tub time for tim

life forms habits. when these habits are disrupted for whatever reason it can be traumatic. it can be annoying it can be revealing.

my habit back to the mid 70’s when i first bought my own house and didnt have to be worrying about others i the bathroom in the morning has been to take a long soaking bath with music tv cigarettes and a pot of french roast. reading the news paper and getting my day in order. an hour, 5 cigarettes and 4 cups of coffee was the usual agenda. newspaper could be finished in that time with the tv blasting out david hartman or diane sawyer in the background.

80s brought a new era where smoking had to move outdoors and the day started with one cigarette on the front porch and up to the tub with the paper coffee and switch form tv to radio in the morning. it was still tub based but the activities were becoming the driver.
the 90’s brought mpr and swimming pool i quit smoking and started raising kids and dealing with the rat race but still the bath in the morning was the respite to start the process.

i moved into a house in the 2000’s with a big old whirlpool tub in the bedroom and i found a late night soak at midnight or an early morning bath at 5 were wonderful ways to find a little peace and quiet and a time to work out the trials and tribulations of life. my kids picked up the tradition and there was a steady stream of soakings clocked on the hot tub.

our new house is a nice house with a main bath for the upstairs bedrooms a master bath with a shower off our bedroom and a bath with a shower downstairs for the bedrooms the boys use down there. so there is one tub. it has the typical set up and when you fill it up the drain lever up by your toes it drains o the bottom of that thing the lever sticks out of. did i get bigger or was it always set up so your torso sticks out of the bath water about 1/2 way. the tub was a morning hot spot with people getting ready for school and by the time it cleared out i was looking at a later start to the day than was ok.

my wife suggested that we look at a hot tub and i jumped at the thought. i found one and enlisted my boys to help me move it. no way… it weighs way too much and is way to difficult to move so i hired tub movers and when they dropped it off i took their cards for an electrician to wire it up and found it was a thousand dollars to wire it up. so plan be went into play. got a buddy who has a brain for electrician kind of stuff an away we went. 3 nights of pulling wires through pvc piping and gluing corners and lengths of pipe to the side of the house with circuit breakers and breaker boxes being placed where they needed to go and zip zap there was a tub in the back yard. its my new respite and gets used a time or two a day for a highlight of my day at 5 in the morning at midnight when its 10 below or 20 above i haven gotten to do it in the heat of summer yet but i bet it will be ok with lemonade

i find silence and reflection are the current mode. i need time to think and reflect and found a way to get er done.

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40 thoughts on “tub time for tim”

I don’t have anything nearly as regular or ritual like as your tub, but I do find I need to do something creative and/or something that gets my hands dirty at fairly regular intervals. This can be baking, digging in the dirt, building something, helping Daughter with a project, creating lessons (and then presenting those lessons) for the music program I volunteer for, writing…something. Something that engages my brain about non-work and non-mom stuff. A bit of quiet and solitude every now and again also helps (floating in the pool in the summer, shoveling snow in the hushed city in the evening…doesn’t have to be fancy).

the rest of my family will not do breakfast but absolutley needs to have the coffee in the cup in order to start the day. i transitioned from my french roast to earl gray nowadays. i go through 10 cups of that a day. i dont think its unhealthy but its too bad its not a health thing. i need a healthy thing 10 times a day on my agenda too.

i remember when this blog started. it was the 6 to 9 scene connected to the radio show and we would comment in unison live to the songs or conversations on the radio. at 901 it was done. the conversations were like twitter comments on the super bowl. snarky comments about this and that. it was fun to be part of the community but if 6-9 didnt fit it didnt make much sense. i can listen to the radio while i am running around in the morning but sitting down to a keyboard to focus on the conversation makes a morning routine of itself. when the radio went away the blog took on a new life. it was a community instead of a daily event.
my life is a little crazy these days but if i cant get to the blog in the morning to comment i have no hesitation stopping in later. come to think of it i dont now if anyone ever sees that stuff but i throw it out there just in case.

My respite that has gotten me through the ups and downs of the past 30-some years has been the routine of feeding animals twice a day. It is something of a moving meditation for me. (Which now I must stand up and get dressed and go out in the cold and do) In addition, breakfast and a book or the computer (along with, in the past, the Morning Show).

What a lovely way to start the day, Cynthia. Or it is if you have such positive attitudes about it. I can imagine people who consider the need to feed their critters as something forced on them by duty. Your embrace of this daily chore reflects a sunny temperament. Life is so much nicer when we can be positive.

I start every day by walking the dog and filling the coffee maker. These are not routines to get me started. They are things that need to be done. If I don’t take the dog for his walk I will have a mess to clean up in the house. I don’t start the coffee machine until later when we have breakfast.

After taking care of the dog and the coffee machine I usually have time, before breakfast, to make a comment here. Also, before breakfast, I check my email and Facebook. In addition, before breakfast, I usually listen to Democracy Now which I can get streaming live starting at 7 and I watch that for an hour if don’t have something else I need to do. On weekends I check the news online at the The Guardian website in place of listening to Democracy Now which doesn’t have shows on those days.

I used to begin each day with a brisk two-hour walk with my dog along the Mississippi river in the off-leash dog park downstream from Minnehaha Falls. I’d wear headphones to tune public radio. Katie often wore a red bandanna.

That isn’t possible now. I haven’t found a substitute that works for me. Perhaps the closest thing I can do now is to enjoy coffee and folk music through my computer speakers while spending three hours writing a letter to a Minnesota friend.

Oh yes, I read more throughout the day, but it’s how I start most days! Just finished a biography of Richard Nixon (Being Nixon: A Man Divided) that gets five stars, not so much for the subject matter but for how the author presented it. Excellent.

Pain remedies including PT exercises, coffee (caffeine is a pain remedy of sorts), faith, taking each day a day at a time and not looking beyond (not expecting the Spanish Inquisition), writing (badly), and loose clothing.

Took my computer in to be fixed. Nice young man says he knows exactly what is wrong. $90 and it is worth it. He would give me a decent price for a trade in on a nice new computer. Instead will spend the money getting back online, for which I have no choice now.

OT. I hope nobody minds an OT post. This is something I’m obsessed with, a YouTube tape of a performance involving Sierra Hull and Keller Williams. I play it over and over, and when it isn’t playing on m computer it is stuck in my head.

Some of you might remember Sierra Hull. She is a 20-year younger version of Alison Krauss. She is a mandolin virtuoso who sings much like Alison. In this piece she and Keller perform two songs on top of each other, two songs sharing the same chord progression. To my mind, this performance is beyond perfect. I feel compelled to share. (It starts with a discussion that you might want to skip.)

Above comment–coffee provided by my luxury coffee maker which grinds the beans on the spot. A good office assistant is vital to making my life work; a cooperative husband who does a lot around the house and the office as well. Kudos to Lou. Audiobooks are my “tim’s hot tub”–my daily luxury that allows me to read as much as I would like to while I drive, exercise, etc. Otherwise I could not read much at all–too busy with the business.

Some artistic expression is another one–I just have to have that outlet. My teacher who hosted an Open Studio in her studio in Jordan recently retired that part of her art business, although she is still working. A bunch of us are putting together our own monthly gathering because we came to rely on each other so much. (Yesterday’s “Tribe” conversation.)I am still working on my mother’s 2015 Christmas story–two more pictures to draw.

In the past TLGMS was part of what made my life work–the wild creativy, the unexpected humor, the music, the silliness–which was why the transition away from it was so difficult for me. This blog was my weaning process. It would take that kind of unfettered creativity in the morning (or any other time, for that matter) to get my loyalty to MPR back in place–I don’t understand the reasoning for squelching that–it is what built them. That would put MPR back on the “what makes my life work” list. But alas….

Thanks, Tim. I’ve always wondered what regular people arrange their days. Since I go to sleep at 3AM and arise at 10AM, one would think that my routine is unusual. Well, it’s not. I do similar things, only at a different time of the 24-hour cycle.

At five minutes to 3AM, I floss my teeth while watching the last cable show, then electric tooth brushing, taking my meds, and adjusting my adjustable bed. The cats arrange themselves on my belly and legs.

I used to set up the coffeemaker before bed, too, but one night I was too lazy and the next morning I didn’t miss it. I haven’t had coffee since. In the morning, I bring my laptop, phone, and any reading materials into the living room and swing my chair around to face the lake. With my little space heater aimed at my legs, I begin the day with reading TB, then check Huffington Post, Facebook, the Strib, and Washington Post. Once all of these have been read, I begin my daily opinionating on the Politics or Opinion Strib boards on which I’m the resident progressive. It’s kinda like eating garlic potato chips in that I don’t know when to stop.
This activity can go on for hours if I don’t have much else to do. I also correspond via email with a dear friend who talks “my language” because he’s a retired therapist who likes to write as much as I do.

Then, every afternoon at 4:PM, I return to my new master bedroom, adjust the bed upright so it’s a couch, drink my daily two wines, turn on cable news, and spend the hours before 3AM watching everything from news to movies to weekly series.

I sometimes wonder how anyone could have such a routine AND work a full time job. When I do get out for lunch with a friend or some errands, it feels like a big day. It has occurred to me that this inactive lifestyle wouldn’t be much different if I were an invalid so there’s constant self-talk about how I “should” change things up a bit, though.